The Corrections might never make it to screen, but Jonathan Franzen’s New Yorker essay on songbird poaching, “Emptying the Skies” (behind the paywall), is already a documentary. The film follows a group of bird lovers trying to save the endangered animals and even includes an interview with Franzen. Although the documentary just found a distributor, there is no word on an official release date. Until then, here’s the trailer.
Franzen on Film
Following Franklin
"Who am I in the face of the Universe if not just a bro who wants to get stuff done?" Tim Goessling tried living a day according to Benjamin Franklin's schedule listed in The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. What was his biggest takeaway? We should self-evaluate and set goals more.
Rejection Romanticized
Recommended Reading: Kavita Das on why writers shouldn’t romanticize rejection. “Not only is it harder for writers of color to get published, but when rejecting our work, publishers tell us that what we’re writing about is too narrow and niche and won’t appeal to mainstream audiences.” Our own Bill Morris writes about the sorry state of rejection letters and literary magazine editors take your questions about them.
Tennessee Williams’s College Days
The Strand Magazine is publishing a previously unseen Tennessee Williams short story in its spring issue. "Crazy Night" is about Williams's lovelorn college days when he describes sex like "vaccination the first day of school."
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The Philosopher’s Lunch
"Another example of Chomsky humour: he calls his assistant’s dog, 'Cat.'" Financial Times sits down for a meal with linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky.
August: Osage County to Film
Tracy Letts' outstanding play August: Osage County was tapped for a movie adaptation back in 2010, but the project seemed to fall by the wayside shortly after. Then, last week, Bob Weinstein (of The Weinstein Company) announced the adaptation will begin filming this fall. It'll star Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts. You can read an excerpt from the play on our Tumblr.
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Long Memory
When Damien Searls first read W.G. Sebald, he thought the German writer was uniquely good at factoring historical circumstance into his thinking. Sebald's unyielding reminders of the horrors of the past were a nice corrective to the feel-good pablums of the ‘90s. But reading Sebald now, Searls thinks something has changed. What happened? The world went online. (Related: Greg Walklin on Sebald’s A Place in the Country.)
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The Crash
“Throughout the Crash, I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere – I let them remain and ploughed on.” Newly minted Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro on writing The Remains of the Day in four weeks.